Blog of a Maker

2nd Interactive Cube, Vibro Bots and The Work of Paul Granjon

Today’s field session was fantastic! It was well planned, was executed well and yielded great results. As we did last week we had a morning discussion and a small brainstorm. We set tasks for the day and got on with them well. The brainstorm concerned ideas for other cubes material types and behaviours/characters that we wished them to portray. I for example have two ideas in mind, one for an inflatable cube that acts like a puffer fish and another idea for a melody/singing cube made from metal and wood.

I showed my super simple and low-tech bristle bots to the group. They were popular. One of these (in concept) is now part of the scared bot making it quiver in the dark. I am still writing the code for this, but once its done that little scared cube shall be complete and ready for testing.

The 2nd cube was started today, this cube shall sense an approaching person or thing using ultrasound and then wheel away in the opposite direction. It will use a motor servo to drive wheels that barely protrude from its base surface, hardly noticeable to the viewer, which it will use to drag its self away from the viewers to hide in a corner somewhere.

Andy and Mallie laser cut two more boxes, this time in plywood. The lazer was not quite set high enough so a couple of the parts had to be scored out with Stanley knifes. The plywood cubes fit together well and look good, one has plain faces whilst the other has a simple line pattern adoring its faces, etched by the laser cutter. The plain plywood cube has been glued, ready for its electronics whilst the etched one is still unglued as it needs a few holes cut in its bottom surface.

I will start working on my inflating cube at home and will hopefully have something to show next Tuesday. I also want to research RFID techniques and how we could use them in our projects as well as a way for our cubes to communicate with each other and perhaps an ‘environment’ we create for them. We should also think about making some design sheets and consider making ideal world plans for the project if we had more time, for example we might like to create a little world or biosphere in which these little cube bots could live. We could illustrate this to show that the progression of our ideas and that the potential for our work does not stop when the field module stops. Final presentation ideas for our cube bots and documentation of the work should be discussed next week.